Bad Monkey Book Reviews

From The New York Times Book Review, August 26, 2007:

Bad Monkeys is something of a science-fiction Catcher in the Rye. The protagonist, Jane Charlotte, tells her life story to a psychiatrist. She cracks wise and doesn’t quite fit into society, and the heart of her story is, seemingly, about a tragic younger brother. She’s a female Holden Caulfield, except she kills criminals with the equivalent of a ray gun.
Along with the Salingeresque details, Ruff has animated Bad Monkeys with the spirit of Philip K. Dick, and he’s borrowed a little seasoning from Jim Thompson and Thomas Pynchon. The ray gun is, naturally, pure Dick, and the fact that you root for Jane even though it becomes clear she’s a sociopath is a classic Thompson touch. (See The Killer Inside Me and Savage Night.) And I felt Pynchon-like flourishes out of The Crying of Lot 49 in Ruff’s elaborately conceived secret societies. The real debt is to Dick, though, in the way Ruff expertly plays with notions of what is real and what is illusion.
Bad Monkeys, allusions aside, is highly entertaining. It moves fast and keeps surprising you. There are also some exciting and hallucinatory action sequences that are so skillfully written I felt as if I was watching the first “Matrix” movie, which I unabashedly loved. Then I snobbishly thought: “Am I reading a screenplay?” But I probably only had that thought knowing I was going to write a review and might have to produce clever, negative things to say. And why shouldn’t movies influence books? The reverse has certainly been true.
Along with making Bad Monkeys a page turner, Ruff dabbles with going deeper, exploring good and evil to a certain degree, and there are characters named Wise, True and Love. But he doesn’t go too deep, which is a good thing (not an evil thing), as it would take away from his delightful and swift storytelling. Throughout the book, you feel as if you’re trying to solve a mystery before the writer gives away his final clue, although Bad Monkeys isn’t so much a “who-dun-it?” as a “who-is-it?” Who is Jane Charlotte? I wasn’t able to solve this book’s riddles before the end, but I had a lot of fun guessing, trying to unravel it all, racing against the clock.
Now here’s a real quibble. I was completely absorbed in the book and felt it ended quite satisfactorily, which is a hard thing to pull off with a science-fiction mystery thriller (a trifecta of genres!). Then I turned the last page, hoping there might be some kind of mad epilogue. But instead I stumbled upon Ruff’s elaborate acknowledgments. He mentions some celebrities and also thanks Philip K. Dick, which seems unnecessary: the novel itself is a generous thank you, a nod to the beyond.
I can see nonfiction writers who have done a lot of research thanking numerous people, but novelists should put brief acknowledgments at the front of a book. I was savoring my last moments with Bad Monkeys, the reading equivalent of post-coital happiness, and then was yanked out of the book’s spell, which I would have liked to stay under for a little while longer, like a dream—or an illusion—I didn’t want to be woken from.
— Jonathan Ames
Copyright 2007 The New York Times